Hungarian Emancipation as a Model Central European Expropriation: How Discourses of Serfdom Argued for Takings

Abstract

ABSTRACT Due to the moral stakes involved, current scholarship on modern expropriation tends to separate nineteenth-century takings, such as emancipation, from twentieth-century ones, such as Aryanization. This article reconnects Central European expropriations across the fin de siècle by demonstrating how emancipation in Hungary served as a model for later takings. The main subject of this analysis is a press debate in upper Hungary (today’s Slovakia) in 1896, roughly fifty years after the Hungarian emancipation and fifty years before the Holocaust and the building of the Soviet Bloc. I show how Christian Socials, Political Antisemites, and Social Democrats in 1896 repurposed emancipation to further their own desired expropriations. This was a critical inner logic of the practice: because the case for emancipation had been persuasive, it now served to legitimate new expropriations. I then demonstrate how emancipatory discourse over the next half century helped to fuel a series of new takings in the area, including land reform, Aryanization, and socialist nationalization. Thus, socially-beneficial takings contributed to later, often criminal ones. Considering that one result of this dynamic was genocide, it behooves scholars to take seriously these linkages.